Today I bought 12 cardinals tetras to my tank, but my angel fish pair are now haunting them to death after the lights turned off.. it started good with no signs of attacking them.. also I have cherry barbs, bronze tetras and emperor tetras in the tank before hand and no problems? Then why are they attacking my cardinals ? đ
Posted by Willing-Western-8381
7 Comments
Angelfish are predators. They’ll do that.
Sudden new food in the territory can set them off really easy
what size tank?
My angelfish killed all of my cardinal tetras as well. They can be very territorial. I ended up giving the angelfish back just because I like the smaller community fish!
Well, at least they had good lunch;)
Ya, this is normal, too small those new fishes
So, I had a set of acaras that grew up with rummy nose tetras. No problems, even when the acaras were full grown. I decided to bulk up the rummy numbers one day. That apparently triggered them into hunting mode, because in just a few days I had fewer tetras than I had started with.
Angelfish are similar, in that theyâre cichlids. They tend to see the fish they grow up around (or that already exist when theyâre added to a new environment) as part of the environment (_usually_), but new additions can be seen as invaders or prey.
But in general, most fish are opportunistic eaters and will eventually try to eat something that fits in their mouths. Itâs always a risk to stock smaller fish with larger ones, even peaceful ones.
Good luck I couldnât have tetras at all with my angels they were huge and the tetras didnât stand a chance even though they lasted a while, then one day they started getting picked off one by one I went from having 12 to maybe six in a week and a half.
Was angel added before or after the other 3 species you had? Angels are mean nasty predators – it could be size of the cardinals that set them off, or if the only fish added after the angels could also be the trigger.
They won’t stop until all 12 are dead, and your risk is that they go after the other species as well.